Female journalists face danger reporting the news

October 31, 2011
CBS News - World Watch
By Marissa Calhoun


NEW YORK -- Over the past 11 years, 41-year-old Iranian journalist Parisa Hafezi has been beaten, harassed and detained for what she describes as just doing her job. Hafezi is Bureau Chief for Reuters in Tehran. There, Hafezi is responsible for overseeing the day to day operations of a 14-person news division tasked with reporting, among many other things, the truth about the Iranian government. She is also one of four female journalists from news organizations all over the world being honored by the International Women's Media Foundation for her courage in the field of journalism.

Last week the International Women's Media Foundation held its 21st Annual Courage in Journalism Awards, recognizing Chiranuch Premchaiporn, who is facing 20 years in a Thailand prison after criticizing the monarchy on her website; Adela Navarro Bello who continues to report on Mexican drug cartels despite death threats; Kate Adie for four decades of reporting from the frontlines of war zones for the BBC; and Parisa Hafezi for enduring beatings and interrogation to report on the 2009 Iranian uprising.

Prominent guests in attendance included Princess Rym Ali of Jordan. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shared a special message honoring the occasion via satellite. Several journalists attended such as Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post and ABC's "Good Morning America" anchor George Stephanopoulus, who introduced Hefezi.

Among the challenges Hafezi faces in her position, is the fact that she is a woman. Reached by phone last Wednesday, Hafezi said "because Iran is an Islamic country, with a male dominated culture, it is harder for a female journalist to fight on many fronts." Not only is Hafezi the first female journalist to work in Iran representing foreign media since 1979, she is also the only female journalist working for Reuters in the Middle East. Hafezi says that having laws in place to protect women in her line of work isn't enough. "It's cultural" said Hafezi, "and that culture needs to change."

While many journalists fled the country when violence ensued after the highly debated 2009 elections, Hafezi and her team decided to stay. In her own words Hafezi describes that decision: "I said to my colleagues, if you want, you can leave. I am staying so that I can feel the fear that the people feel and I can write about it."

Staying in Iran came with high stakes to Hafezi, who is also a single-mother to two young girls. Her home was raided in front of her kids after reporting that Iranian President Ahmadinejad favored a U.N.-drafted nuclear fuel deal in November of 2009. "My kids were scared -- they don't forget -- especially the little one," said Hafezi.

Months after raids on her home and work place, in February 2010, Hafezi was abducted one night by four men as she left her office and taken to an unmarked building where she was subjected to verbal and physical harassment and intimidation for hours.

"What upset me the most," said Hafezi, "was that they made accusations that I was involved sexually with former government officials. How else they proclaimed, would I have been previewed to top secret information." This experience, Hafezi said, made her feel "humiliated," because she had no clue what the interrogators were talking about. Yet, she maintained her silence when asked to name her sources.

Today, the Reuters offices in Tehran are under constant surveillance by the Iranian government and there have recently been several break-ins. The Iranian government constantly refers to Reuters as "the Zionist news agency." Despite all of this, Hafezi is determined to do her job as Bureau Chief and report the truth.

"It's my job and I love my job", said Hafezi. "When you love your job, you want to do it properly for the sake of other Iranian women, to show that we can do it. We can overcome difficulty." Her ultimate inspiration, Hafezi said is her daughters. "To pave the way for my daughters, I want them to have a better country. Who else better to do it than I? It is my duty."

Also honored on Thursday, Kate Adie, the BBC's first female Chief News Correspondent who took home the IWMF's Lifetime Achievement Award. Addie believes that there are difficulties being perceived as a professional journalist in countries where women are regarded as second class; however, she encourages young women journalists to be aware, be smart, and to continue reporting in areas where women are underrepresented. Even though Adie's work has pioneered the way for other female journalists, she hopes to be remembered more for her reporting. "We don't call ourselves women journalists, we call ourselves journalists because we're equal, we don't demand anything special, and we don't report in a different way. We are just journalists."

According to the IWMF website, "the Courage in Journalism Award is the only international awards that recognize the bravery of women journalists." The award is given annually to recognize women who have endured violence, threats, and political pressure in the field. This year two receptions were held; on in Los Angeles (October 24th) and one in New York.

CBS's Lorie Acio contributed to this report.

Men still dominate national newspaper journalism

The Guardian
Greenslade Blog
April 2011


It is still a men's world in national newspaper journalism, according to a survey released last night by the campaigning group Women in Journalism (WiJ).

The study found that 74% of news journalists on the nationals are men and that men also dominate political and business journalism. Somewhat less surprisingly, just 3% of sports journalists are women

Among other eye-opening findings are that The Independent had the lowest proportion of female staff. Just 25% of its editorial team are women. The Sun the Daily Telegraph were little different, with just 26% of female staff.

At the other end of the scale, the papers with the highest proportion of women journalists were The Observer and the Daily Mail, both with 36% of women, closely followed by the Daily Express with 35%.

Male journalists also people areas that researchers regard as "traditional subjects that women might have been expected to dominate". So 49% of lifestyle reporters are men and 70% of arts reporters are also male.

It was clear from the study that women are less likely to be in senior positions. Eight out of the top 10 newspapers having almost twice as many male editors as women editors.

That gender divide penetrates the whole newspaper industry with women making up just 30% of all newspaper journalists.

Rowenna Davis, who led the research, said:

"These results raise serious questions about the meritocracy of our national press.

The UK's media contributes a huge amount to our democracy by holding others accountable, but it should not be beyond that scrutiny itself.

With such gaping under-representation in hard news, business and politics, we have to question whether the absence of women is effecting the content and slant of our news.

I have been lucky to have had a positive experience with news desks, but this research shows that a significant number of women have been less fortunate."

And Sue Matthias, WiJ's chair and editor of the Financial Times magazine, said: "Women's rights in the workplace may have improved, but this research shows that there is still a long way to go in British newspapers.

"The gender imbalance we have uncovered is shocking and it seems old attitudes are still alive and well in many places."

The findings were discussed last night at a WiJ event to celebrate the centenary of International Women's Day (on 8 March).

On the panel were Natalie Bennett, editor of Guardian Weekly, Eve Pollard, the former editor of the Sunday Mirror and Sunday Express, and the award-winning writer and broadcaster Yvonne Roberts.

The study was carried out by the research company Echo in October last year. It involved 28 national papers.

Incidentally, Rowenna is a former journalism student at City University, where I teach post-grads. In my seven or so years at the university I have noted the that females generally outnumber male students. Yet the jobs, apparently, still go to the boys. Why is that?

Heroic, Female and Muslim

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: December 15, 2010
The New York Times


What’s the ugliest side of Islam? Maybe it’s the Somali Muslim militias that engage in atrocities like the execution of a 13-year-old girl named Aisha Ibrahim. Three men raped Aisha, and when she reported the crime she was charged with illicit sex, half-buried in the ground before a crowd of 1,000 and then stoned to death.

That’s the extremist side of Islam that drives Islamophobia in the United States, including Congressional hearings on American Muslims that House Republicans are planning for next year.

But there’s another side of Islam as well, represented by an extraordinary Somali Muslim woman named Dr. Hawa Abdi who has confronted the armed militias. Amazingly, she forced them to back down — and even submit a written apology. Glamour magazine, which named Dr. Hawa a “woman of the year,” got it exactly right when it called her “equal parts Mother Teresa and Rambo.”

Dr. Hawa, a 63-year-old ob-gyn who earned a law degree on the side, is visiting the United States to raise money for her health work back home. A member of Somalia’s elite, she founded a one-room clinic in 1983, but then the Somalian government collapsed, famine struck, and aid groups fled. So today Dr. Hawa is running a 400-bed hospital.

Over the years, the hospital became the core of something even grander. Thousands and thousands of people displaced by civil war came to shelter on Dr. Hawa’s 1,300 acres of farmland around the hospital. Today her home and hospital have been overtaken by a vast camp that she says numbers about 90,000 displaced people.

Dr. Hawa supplies these 90,000 people with drinking water and struggles to find ways to feed them. She worries that handouts breed dependency (and in any case, United Nations agencies can’t safely reach her now to distribute food), so she is training formerly nomadic herding families to farm and even to fish in the sea.

She’s also pushing education. An American freelance journalist, Eliza Griswold, visited Dr. Hawa’s encampment in 2007 and 2008 and was stunned that an unarmed woman had managed to create a secure, functioning oasis surrounded by a chaotic land of hunger and warlords. Ms. Griswold helped Dr. Hawa start a school for 850 children, mostly girls. It’s only a tiny fraction of the children in the camp, but it’s a start. (Ms. Griswold also wrote movingly about Dr. Hawa in her book “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam.”)

In addition, Dr. Hawa runs literacy and health classes for women, as well as programs to discourage female genital mutilation. And she operates a tiny jail — for men who beat their wives.

“We are trying an experiment,” she told me. “We women in Somalia are trying to be leaders in our community.”

So Dr. Hawa had her hands full already — and then in May a hard-line militia, Hizb al-Islam, or Party of Islam, decided that a woman shouldn’t run anything substantial. The militia ordered her to hand over operations, and she refused — and pointedly added: “I may be a woman, but I’m a doctor. What have you done for society?”

The Party of Islam then attacked with 750 soldiers and seized the hospital. The world’s Somalis reacted with outrage, and the militia backed down and ordered Dr. Hawa to run the hospital, but under its direction.

She refused. For a week there were daily negotiations, but Dr. Hawa refused to budge. She demanded that the militia not only withdraw entirely but also submit a written apology.

“I was begging her, ‘Just give in,’ ” recalled Deqo Mohamed, her daughter, a doctor in Atlanta who spoke regularly to her mother by telephone. “She was saying, ‘No! I will die with dignity.’ ”

It didn’t come to that. The Party of Islam tired of being denounced by Somalis at home and around the world, so it slinked off and handed over an apology — but also left behind a wrecked hospital. The operating theater still isn’t functional, and that’s why Dr. Hawa is here, appealing for money (especially from ethnic Somalis). She has worked out an arrangement with Vital Voices, a group that helps to empower female leaders, to channel tax-deductible contributions to her hospital.

What a woman! And what a Muslim! It’s because of people like her that sweeping denunciations of Islam, or the “Muslim hearings” planned in Congress, rile me — and seem profoundly misguided.

The greatest religious battles are often not between faiths, but within faiths. The widest gulfs are often not those that divide one religion from the next, but those between extremists and progressives within a single faith. And in this religious season, there’s something that we can all learn from the courage, compassion and tolerance of Dr. Hawa Abdi.

I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 16, 2010, on page A39 of the New York edition.

In Siberia Race, Ruling Party Uses Clenched Fist

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Published: December 10, 2010
The New York Times


NOVOSIBIRSK, Russia — On the eve of regional elections, an opposition candidate named Olga V. Safronova arrived at a school for a campaign finale. She planned a rousing speech with a refrain that Russia had been seized by a dictatorial ruling party.

But operatives from that very party showed up to stop her.
What displeased them was this: Ms. Safronova’s political party was supposed to be a fake opposition, created by the Kremlin to give the illusion that Russia was a thriving democracy. Now, though, this puppet party was rebelling here in Siberia — battling for votes, defying the governing party and even assailing Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin himself.

The governing party — in coordination with the authorities themselves — soon responded. And their efforts to suppress Ms. Safronova’s party, A Just Russia, seemed to underscore how laws intended to guarantee free and fair elections carry little weight in Russia.

The governing party operatives tried to bar Ms. Safronova from the school. They called the police to interrogate her. They warned teachers and others that they would be fired if they attended, and most left. Ms. Safronova ignored the threats and began speaking in an auditorium that was nearly deserted. Even so, the operatives sought to shout her down.

“You do not have permission to speak here!” said Gennadi V. Bykovsky, a former prosecutor and aide to the governing party candidate. “We don’t want to hear your blabbering.”

Ms. Safronova lashed back. “You are corrupt!” she said. “Do you see this? They can violate the law as much as they want. And me? How dare I! I should be lined up against the wall and shot for just trying to express my point of view.”

All around Novosibirsk, A Just Russia came under pressure, and had little chance of defending itself. The police raided the party’s offices, and the state television channel accused it of conducting a dirty campaign. Local officials even emblazoned logos of the governing party, United Russia, on city bulldozers to give the party, not the government, credit for fixing roads.

On Election Day, hundreds of soldiers from a military garrison were marched to a polling place and ordered to vote for United Russia, according to nonpartisan voting monitors.

It was as if the governing party and the government had merged, just as in the Communist era. And in many ways, they have. United Russia effectively controls regional governments, prosecutor’s offices, courts, police departments and election commissions.

Up against this colossus went Ms. Safronova, 53, a former Kremlin supporter who grew increasingly frustrated with the country’s political stagnation and decided to do something about it this year. She mounted her campaign for regional assembly, and worked to transform A Just Russia in Novosibirsk, Russia’s third largest city.

From the start, Ms. Safronova realized that the odds were against her.
She dressed like a corporate lawyer on the campaign trail, slogging through the mud of a dairy farm in the city suburbs in high heels. But the truth was that she was a widow with little money who lived with her mother, son and granddaughter in a threadbare housing project that looked as if it had not been renovated since Brezhnev’s time. She had long blond hair that she sometimes styled in a classic Slavic peasant braid, as if to hark back to her rural roots.

An economist by training, she had made many enemies as regional leader of a group called the Public Anticorruption Committee and, before that, as an advocate for small business in Novosibirsk. She expected that the governing party would be infuriated with the regional branch of A Just Russia. And so she was not surprised when she received menacing phone calls from people who would not identify themselves.

“They say, if I don’t end my campaign, they will kill me,” she said.
Still, she thought that even if she did not win, she could secure a high enough percentage of the vote to help prove that Russia had a viable new opposition at the regional level.

If United Russia went unchallenged, she insisted, then Russia would end up like the Soviet Union: foundering under the corrupt and incompetent reign of a single party.

“We are hoping that a massive number of people will come out on Election Day and declare that they will not take this anymore,” she said shortly before the voting. “We are striving to create a true multiparty system, a real democracy in Russia.”

To United Russia, those were fighting words.

A Puppet Rival Party

When the Kremlin birthed A Just Russia in October 2006, Mr. Putin, then Russia’s president, said the new party would “promote democratic values.” But it would also allow the Russian leadership to declare that the country had a multiparty system — even though A Just Russia was loyal to Mr. Putin.

(To read the rest of this article, please click on the link in this blog post's title above.)

Batgirl and Other Fair Pay Heroes

By Linda D. Hallman
Women's Media Center
November 30, 2010

While the Senate recently bungled its chance to advance paycheck fairness, gender pay equality has impressive champions ready to join the battle again, as AAUW’s executive director Linda D. Hallman explains.


On November 17, the Senate filibustered the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill that would have empowered women to learn more about how they’re paid while making businesses think twice about doling out discriminatory paychecks.

The vote ended in a 58 to 41 tally to move the bill forward, which, in most places, would have been a victory. However, the Senate makes its own rules, and without 60 yea votes on the procedural motion, the Paycheck Fairness Act cannot proceed.

But that’s enough doom and gloom. So many people worked so hard on this bill, and, while we’re not done yet, AAUW and I would like to give proper due to all those who did—and didn’t—contribute to our efforts to end the gender pay gap.

The MVP Award: Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) wins our sincerely given and much-deserved MVP award. As a longtime champion of women’s rights and House sponsor of the Paycheck Fairness Act, DeLauro personally made thousands of calls to colleagues and was an ever-present advocate as the bill went to the Senate. Her commitment and that of her staff to women and their families continually inspires us and humbles us.

The Never Give Up Award: After barnstorming the country to convince Congress to right the Supreme Court’s wrong in her precedent-setting case, the indomitable Lilly Ledbetter wasn’t finished. She spoke about the Paycheck Fairness Act in her speech the day President Obama signed her namesake bill, and she has been a vocal, moving advocate for the Paycheck Fairness Act every day since.

The Boots on the Ground Award: Thousands of women and men all over the country picked up their phones, grabbed their favorite pens, or sat down at their computers to let their senators, local newspapers, and blog readers know how important this bill was to them. They made lobby visits at home and on Capitol Hill, called into radio shows, and commented on blogs. This kind of grassroots support is priceless. We can only hope that next time a bipartisan group of senators will listen.

The Bully Pulpit Award: For their efforts to rally attention and votes, the Obama Administration wins this award and our thanks. It is beefing up equal pay enforcement, working across the government in its Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force, and ensuring that the issue of pay equity is alive and well at the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor. The president even thanked AAUW and the coalition in the Roosevelt Room this week for our efforts. You’re welcome, Mr. President, and we’re not done yet.

The Groovy Newbie Award: Fresh from their election victories, newly sworn-in Senators Joe Manchin (D) of West Virginia and Chris Coons (D) of Delaware said yes to the Paycheck Fairness Act. This vote is a wonderful start, and we hope to count on the support of these senators on AAUW priorities in the future.

The Blast from the Past Award: A big thank you goes to Batgirl for showing the world that even Caped Crusaders can suffer from pay discrimination—and that we can fight back. Her starring role in our update to a 1972 public service announcement displayed the urgency of this issue in a fun, accessible way.

Honorable Mentions: Many thanks go to Senators Chris Dodd (D-CT), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), and Tom Harkin (D-IA), all longtime pay equity advocates who championed this bill.

The Lamestream Award: Just one day after the Paycheck Fairness Act, an economic game-changer, failed to pass in the Senate, many news outlets focused instead on Bristol Palin’s upset on Dancing with the Stars and Prince William’s engagement. Congratulations to both, but we’re disgusted that the media saw no reason to cover a matter so important to the livelihood of American women and their families.

The Half Nelson Award: Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson was the lone Democrat to vote against the Paycheck Fairness Act. While it’s disappointing that Nelson voted no, we are ever optimistic and trust that he would have voted the right way if even one Republican had joined him.

The Lockstep Award: Despite their record of support for women’s and civil rights, Maine Republican Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins decided to stick with their party on this bill. AAUW hopes that their vote against the Paycheck Fairness Act is not a signal that bipartisanship is already dead in the newly elected Senate.

The Father Does Not Know Best Award: It’s unfortunate that Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) cannot accept this award in person, because we’d be interested to hear him justify his no vote to his two daughters, not to mention the very blue state where he will face reelection in 2012.

Paycheck fairness advocates lost this battle, but the war on discrimination continues. We’ll no doubt encounter more stubborn senators with deaf ears, but AAUW and our coalition partners are determined to move ahead and to continue breaking through barriers for women and girls. Stay tuned.

The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author alone and do not represent WMC. WMC is a 501(c)(3) organization and does not endorse candidates.

A Woman. A Prostitute. A Slave.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 27, 2010
The New York Times


Americans tend to associate “modern slavery” with illiterate girls in India or Cambodia. Yet there I was the other day, interviewing a college graduate who says she spent three years terrorized by pimps in a brothel in Midtown Manhattan.

Those who think that commercial sex in this country is invariably voluntary — and especially men who pay for sex — should listen to her story. The men buying her services all mistakenly assumed that she was working of her own volition, she says.

Yumi Li (a nickname) grew up in a Korean area of northeastern China. After university, she became an accountant, but, restless and ambitious, she yearned to go abroad.

So she accepted an offer from a female jobs agent to be smuggled to New York and take up a job using her accounting skills and paying $5,000 a month. Yumi’s relatives had to sign documents pledging their homes as collateral if she did not pay back the $50,000 smugglers’ fee from her earnings.

Yumi set off for America with a fake South Korean passport. On arrival in New York, however, Yumi was ordered to work in a brothel.

“When they first mentioned prostitution, I thought I would go crazy,” Yumi told me. “I was thinking, ‘how can this happen to someone like me who is college-educated?’ ” Her voice trailed off, and she added: “I wanted to die.”

She says that the four men who ran the smuggling operation — all Chinese or South Koreans — took her into their office on 36th Street in Midtown Manhattan. They beat her with their fists (but did not hit her in the face, for that might damage her commercial value), gang-raped her and videotaped her naked in humiliating poses. For extra intimidation, they held a gun to her head.

If she continued to resist working as a prostitute, she says they told her, the video would be sent to her relatives and acquaintances back home. Relatives would be told that Yumi was a prostitute, and several of them would lose their homes as well.

Yumi caved. For the next three years, she says, she was one of about 20 Asian prostitutes working out of the office on 36th Street. Some of them worked voluntarily, she says, but others were forced and received no share in the money.

Yumi played her role robotically. On one occasion, Yumi was arrested for prostitution, and she says the police asked her if she had been trafficked.
“I said no,” she recalled. “I was really afraid that if I hinted that I was a victim, the gang would send the video to my family.”

Then one day Yumi’s closest friend in the brothel was handcuffed by a customer, abused and strangled almost to death. Yumi rescued her and took her to the hospital. She said that in her rage, she then confronted the pimps and threatened to go public.

At that point, the gang hurriedly moved offices and changed phone numbers. The pimps never mailed the video or claimed the homes in China; those may have been bluffs all along. As for Yumi and her friend, they found help with Restore NYC, a nonprofit that helps human trafficking victims in the city.

I can’t be sure of elements of Yumi’s story, but it mostly rings true to me and to the social workers who have worked with her. There’s no doubt that while some women come to the United States voluntarily to seek their fortunes in the sex trade, many others are coerced — and still others start out forced but eventually continue voluntarily. And it’s not just foreign women. The worst cases of forced prostitution, especially of children, often involve home-grown teenage runaways.

No one has a clear idea of the scale of the problem, and estimates vary hugely. Some think the problem is getting worse; others believe that Internet services reduce the role of pimps and lead to commercial sex that is more consensual. What is clear is that forced prostitution should be a national scandal. Just this month, authorities indicted 29 people, mostly people of Somali origin from the Minneapolis area, on charges of running a human trafficking ring that allegedly sold many girls into prostitution — one at the age of 12.

There are no silver bullets, but the critical step is for the police and prosecutors to focus more on customers (to reduce demand) and, above all, on pimps. Prostitutes tend to be arrested because they are easy to catch, while pimping is a far harder crime to prosecute. That’s one reason thugs become pimps: It’s hugely profitable and carries less risk than selling drugs or stealing cars. But that can change as state and federal authorities target traffickers rather than their victims.

Nearly 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, it’s time to wipe out the remnants of slavery in this country.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 28, 2010, on page WK8 of the New York edition.

Female Officers to Begin Serving on US Navy Submarines

October 25, 2010
MS Magazine


On Thursday, the US Navy announced that women will start serving on US submarines in December 2011. Twenty-four female officers began training in July and will become the first women to serve on American submarines, according to CNN. Though women have served on the Navy's non-combat surface ships since 1973 and its combat surface ships since 1993, they have never been allowed to serve on submarines.

The Associated Press reports that women were previously barred from submarine duty due to the extended deployments and the close quarters required for submarine service.

The female officers were chosen from US Naval Academy graduates, ROTC programs, and Officer Candidate School, reports CNN. The women will serve on four submarines, including the USS Wyoming and USS Georgia, which are based in Kings Bay, Georgia, and the USS Maine and USS Ohio, based in Bangor, Washington. The 560-foot submarines were chosen for their large size, which will allow the Navy to create accommodations for women onboard.

The Associated Press reports that the Navy is currently allowing only female Officers to serve on submarines.

Media Resources: CNN 10/22/10; Associated Press 10/21/10